The Narrative Shaping of Meaning in
Gail Godwin’s A Southern Family: Why Fiction?
Elaine Lux
Nyack College
In her novel A Southern Family (1987), Gail Godwin fictionalized a real-life
incident concerning a suicide-murder in her family. Interweaving narrative
theory and literary analysis, this paper asks “why fiction?” for the telling of this
story. In the context of narrative’s capacity to “make present” our experiences
(Schiff, 2012, p.36), the paper explores some of the ways in which Godwin
makes this fictional work an effective narrative tool for shaping meaning, and it
suggests that the novel’s narrativity transforms this traumatic background story
into both a work of art and a form of “story repair” (Howard, 1991, p. 149).
On October 2, 1983, novelist Gail Godwin received shocking
news. Her half-brother Tommy had shot and killed his girlfriend and then
himself. A New Yorker for the past 30 years, Godwin was visiting her
mother in North Carolina when the two dead bodies were discovered in
an automobile, so she was with the family in their initial crisis. The
incident haunted Godwin, and she wrote about it in fictionalized form in
her novel A Southern Family (1987), published just four years after
Tommy’s death. Godwin openly acknowledges the novel’s correlations to
her life, calling A Southern Family one of her two “most autobiographical
books” (as cited in Donlon, 1994, p. 11). Years later, in her nonfiction
work Heart (2001), she speaks in the first person about the events
surrounding her half-brother’s death. The account is only twelve pages,
but it makes apparent to a reader of both works how closely the novel
adheres to key details of the real-life event. Despite its many
correspondences to real life, in A Southern Family Godwin uses what she
calls a “fictional truth,” in which her allegiance is to her “material” and
her “vision” rather than to the external facts (as cited in Donlon, p. 17).
This paper asks “why fiction?” for the telling of this story. To answer this
question, it explores some of the ways in which Godwin makes fiction an
effective narrative tool for shaping meaning and, to borrow Jerome
NARRATIVE WORKS: ISSUES, INVESTIGATIONS, & INTERVENTIONS 3(2), 29-48
©Elaine Lux, 2013
30
LUX: NARRATIVE SHAPING OF MEANING
Bruner’s (1986) memorable words, how she “creates possible worlds
through the transformation of the ordinary and the conventionally
‘given’” (p. 49), by using the suppleness of fiction to create a work that is
both narrative art and narrative therapy.
According to Gerben Westerhof and Ernst Bohlmeijer (2012), in
narrative therapy, the goal is to find a better way to reframe and/or
replace the “problem-saturated story” with “an alternative, more
satisfying, or preferred story” (pp. 118-119), and this process is what
happens in A Southern Family. In telling about her half-brother’s murdersuicide in novelistic form, Godwin is drawn instinctively to what Brian
Schiff (2012) identifies as narrative’s most interesting and essential
characteristic: “the meanings that we are able to express and articulate
through narrating” (p. 35). Schiff speaks, as well, of narrative’s ability to
“make present” our experiences (p. 36) through communicating “the feel
and texture of our lives” (p. 37) and through bringing into a confluence of
time and space the unwieldy details of a story to make it alive in the now
—personally, socially, and culturally. George S. Howard (1991) uses the
term “story repair” to highlight the narrative nature of therapy: “Life—
The Stories We Live By; Psychopathology—Stories Gone Mad;
Psychotherapy—Exercises in Story Repair” (p. 194); he emphasizes the
important role of culture in shaping “some of the stories we live by” (p.
190). Jill Freedman and Gene Combs (1996) aspire “to think more like
novelists and less like technocrats” (p. 33) in doing narrative therapy.
Their description of the process of narrative therapy emphasizes the
parallel between fiction-writing and narrative therapy: “Particular strands
of narrative are selected and thickened by weaving back and forth
between story development and meaning-making. That is, as someone
begins to develop an alternative story . . . a tapestry of story developments
and their meaning is woven” (p. 140).
Freedman and Combs articulate what many novelists, readers, and
theorists know intuitively, regarding fiction: “that truth can be found in
descriptions of events that never occurred” (p. 99). In fiction’s ability to
weave together what is factual and what is possible, in its ability to
interweave details and patterns, it taps into the affective realm. Thus, in
the case of the unclear sequence of events regarding the trauma of her
half-brother’s desperate emotions and violence to self and other, Godwin
may have needed to go to a fictional mode to create a narrative of what
happened, especially one which provides access to feelings about the
event and reframes the life of Theo (the fictional counterpart of her halfbrother Tommy) to suggest some redemptive meaning for it. As Judith
NARRATIVE WORKS 3(2) 31
Herman (1992) explains, traumatic memories are stored in a nonverbal
part of the brain in the form of images and bodily sensations, not in
language. In constructing this work from shadowy details and incomplete
knowledge, Godwin, herself shocked by the event, in effect performs as a
novelist the roles of both therapist and patient so as to gain perspective
and to reconstruct with affect the story of what happened from incomplete
memories and from language that is often “partially dissociated” in early
narrative attempts. As Herman explains: “Out of the fragmented
components of frozen imagery and sensation, patient and therapist slowly
reassemble an organized, detailed, verbal account, oriented in time and
historical context,” but the narrative itself, “without the accompanying
emotions,” is “without therapeutic effect” (p. 177). Indeed, using fiction
to tell the truth in and about a traumatic situation, in actuality, may make
the story more, not less, accurate regarding its deepest emotional truths.
What Bruner (1998) says of the journalist can also be applied to
the novelist writing autobiographical fiction: “It is his or her function not
simply to cherish the facts that do not yet make sense in anybody’s story
but also to generate candidate narratives that both handle those aberrant
facts and generate new ones” (p. 6). For Godwin, as for Bruner (1998),
“[facts] live in context; what holds most human contexts together is a
narrative” (p. 6). In Arthur Frank’s (2002) words, stories “do not present
a self formed before the story is told” but rather become the means by
which the person “become[s] for the first time that which [she or] he is”
(p. 15). It is as if, in reframing the life of Tommy through Theo, Godwin
allows Tommy to become what he would have become if he had more
time to let him emerge through story into what he is. And, indeed, writing
the novel seems to have helped Godwin to work through her complex
response of sorrow, horror, and guilt, for in March of 2009, when I
interviewed her about parallels between her life and fiction, she pointed
me to A Southern Family (personal interview, March 18, 2009). Clearly,
she regards the novel as spiritually rich and personally and artistically
revealing.
To explore the way that Godwin’s novel is both a form of
narrative therapy and art, we will turn our attention to some specific ways
Godwin shapes narrative meaning and accomplishes story repair in three
primary story threads: in Theo/Tommy’s life and death, in Clare
Campion/Gail Godwin’s writing, and in Southern culture. In seeing why
and how the choice of using fiction fosters story repair in these three
primary threads, we will look through the lenses of five artistic
components that enhance the shaping of meaning in the novel: naming,
32
LUX: NARRATIVE SHAPING OF MEANING
polyphony, parallelism, metanarrative reflection, and generative
metaphor. These artistic components help weave a powerful and
artistically complex novel in which the “problem-saturated story” [is
reframed] with “an alternative, more satisfying, or preferred story”
(Westerhof & Bohlmeijer, pp. 118-119).
Naming
The naming of characters is an essential aspect of fiction-writing,
and often authors find this action very significant to their artistic
purposes. Godwin’s penchant for attaching importance to the naming of
her characters is made salient in Heart (2001): “I wrote about this
[Tommy’s death] in A Southern Family. Tommy became Theo, a name
that would have suited him well. Rebel became Rafe. I chose the name
Clare for myself because I hoped for more clarity” (p. 148). Though many
other names in the novel have important associations, we will focus here
on the name Theo, for, although Theo dies early in the novel, he is the
absence around which the novel takes its shape. Indeed, Theo becomes, in
some odd way, a Christ-figure, despite his seemingly meaningless selfdestruction and the apparent misfiring of his life. Theodore means “God’s
gift” (Room, 2002) but the name Theo, used throughout the novel, is
itself a root form of Theos, meaning God. In its Germanic roots, Theobald
means a “bold, brave” person (Hanks & Hardcastle, 2006 ). As the novel
winds itself outward, Theo’s disdain of class and race elitism and his
desire to help and rescue others emerge. Though his suicide can be seen
as cowardly, through the memories of others, his unconventional
resistance to the claustrophobic snobbery and rules of southern stratified
life lend him a brave and bold persona. In his acceptance of all people, he
can be seen as a friend of God, and his mysterious appearances in his
brother Rafe’s drunken stupor and in Sister Patrick’s dream make us feel
that he not only is not dead in spirit, but is loved by God.
Jocelyn Hazelwood Donlon’s (1994) interview with Godwin
provides an important clue to the personal significance of Theo’s name
for the author, who shares her childhood memory of a series of “made up
stories” her mother told her, around “a particular character named
Theophelus, ‘The Awfullest Bear in the World,’ and he was always in
some trouble.” The adult Godwin sees this character created by her
mother as a “combination of what [her mother] was like as a bad little girl
and what I was like as a bad little girl. Or what we would have liked to be
like” (p. 12). Godwin shows this same identification with the character
NARRATIVE WORKS 3(2) 33
whose actions express the shadow side of herself in her description of her
first short story, written when Godwin was eight years old, about a man
named Ollie, whom she, as a reflective adult, feels certain “came out of
Theophelus doing things – expressing our rage, misbehaving” (p. 13).
This combination of acting out and being lovable can be seen in the
character Theo, whom Clare, the writer figure in the novel, comes to see
as a part of herself that she could have but did not become. The
association for Godwin, whether conscious or unconscious, between
Theophelus and Theo is made clear by their proximity in Godwin’s
thoughts. Not long after telling her story about Theophelus, Godwin turns
to the topic of Theo and his awareness of “the whole codes business: the
sub-stories and the sub-texts and the using courtesy as a lubricant, as well
as a weapon. My character Theo, in A Southern Family, has a
conversation with a European man about this topic: southern codes and
courtesy as weapon” (p. 15). Because the name Theophelus, a variant
spelling of Theophilus, means “friend of God,” as well as “lover of God
or beloved by God” (Hanks & Hardcastle), and Theophilus is the person
addressed by Luke in two books of the New Testament, Godwin’s
personal associations with Theo’s name exude both aspects of her vision
of him in the novel: misguided and admirable, secular and spiritual.
Ron Emerick (2001) calls Godwin’s “selection of a name for the
mysterious Theo . . . crucial” (p. 138). Rhetorically asking why Godwin
has named “what [he] would argue, is the novel’s main character so
obviously,” he answers: “Godwin clearly wants us to make the
connection between Theo and divinity, and she confirms the connection
in numerous references to Christ and the New Testament throughout the
novel” (p.138). Admitting that Theo, chiefly because of his suicide and
his murder of his girlfriend, might be seen as “an unlikely candidate for
sainthood,” Emerick shows that “despite some evidence to the contrary,
Godwin continuously reinforces the connections between Theo and
Christ,” including his carpentry work for his father and his laughingly
delivered description as a savior by Clare: “Theo was always trying to
save people. . . . He would drive around at night when he was a teenager,
with this first-aid kit he had, hoping to find an accident” (as cited by
Emerick, p. 138). Emerick cites the compellingly suggestive interaction
between the dead Theo and the drunken Rafe, his brother. Rafe cries out,
“Theo, you’ve got to help me. Jesus! My head is going around like those
strobe lights and I’m so sick I could die!” Theo tells Rafe that even
though it’s too late for himself, he can “get [Rafe] home,” saying “Let me
tell you the secrets of the universe. You won’t remember any of it in the
34
LUX: NARRATIVE SHAPING OF MEANING
morning, but you’ll know I at least got you home” (p. 506). For Emerick,
this sequence is a dream, but Godwin leaves it ambiguous whether the
alcohol-soaked Rafe actually drives home safely in a severely impaired
state or whether he simply falls asleep drunk and dreams. Clearly, in
either interpretation, Theo is a Christ figure for Rafe. And in Sister
Patrick’s dream sequence, in the last chapter, a man rises from the dead,
and she just knows this refers to Theo. When she tells Lily about the
dream, which relates Theo to Christ via the image of rising from the dead,
Sister Patrick enhances Lily’s faith and gives her hope. In fact, Theo, in
his absence, is the central character of the novel.
Polyphony
Being able to choose innuendo-rich names is one advantage for
Godwin in choosing fiction over autobiographical account to tell this
story, both artistically and personally. As we have seen in exploring
Theo’s name, the choice of his name helps Godwin to find an artistic
resonance in the story even as she accomplishes part of her own needed
story repair by finding a better way to view her half-brother Tommy’s life
and death. Being able to write from many points of view is another.
Godwin skillfully weaves multiple viewpoints and voices into the novel,
helping her to artistically enrich the novel’s layers of meaning and to
suggest an emerging cultural story repair. The term “polyphony” is being
used broadly here, to encompass variegation of voice, socio-linguistic
register, and complexity of dialogic interaction caused not only by the
varied voices and societal-cultural backgrounds of the characters who
interact but by the doubled voice caused by the author’s indirect voice
behind the characters’ words. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin’s general
observation about the novelist, in “Discourse in the Novel” (19341935/1981), is very applicable to Godwin’s use of multiple viewpoints in
A Southern Family:
The prose writer as a novelist does not strip away the intentions of
others from the heteroglot language of his works, he does not
violate those socio-ideological cultural horizons (big and little
worlds) that open up behind heteroglot languages—rather, he
welcomes them into his work. The prose writer makes use of
words that are already populated with the social intentions of
others and compels them to serve his own new intentions. (pp.
299-300)
NARRATIVE WORKS 3(2) 35
Because of the inextricable relationship of culture with fiction,
and with construction of self, Bruner (1991) compares autobiography
with the novel, in that both “[involve] not only the construction of self,
but also a construction of one’s culture” (p. 77). He emphasizes the need
to bring out the significance of a life “in the constructing, in the text, or
the text making” (p. 69), as “self-making (or ‘life-making’) depends
heavily upon the symbolic system in which it is conducted—its
opportunities and constraints” (p. 77). Alan Palmer’s use of the term
“intermental,” which he links to “social minds,” surely fits A Southern
Family, with his emphasis, as described by Jens Brockmeier (2011), on
narrative as a means of “giv[ing] shape to phenomena such as social
discourses, collective thinking, and forms of consciousness that are
constituted by more than one thinking, talking, and feeling individual” (p.
260).
In seeking to create meaning, in the novel and in her life,
regarding Theo/Tommy’s untimely death and unsettled life, Godwin
brings into the novel the shifting culture of the South, almost as a
character. Theo’s early refusals to adhere to race and class boundaries
make his voice distinct from what would be expected in his immediate
cultural environment, but he seems unable to do more than “shock the
bourgeoisie” (p. 286), rather than using his insights to create a meaningful
life narrative for himself. Theo’s protests, including wearing an
inappropriate suit to his job at an accounting firm, his marriage to the
mountain girl Snow, his earlier close personal friendship with the African
American construction worker LeRoy, with whom he was “pretty much
inseparable till LeRoy went off to prison for armed robbery” (p. 283), are
a sign of the breaking down of old social barriers, as is Lily’s shocking
marriage to Ralph Quick, Clare’s stepfather, who came from the lower
classes and is part Native American. The death of the Old South is
reflected in these socially resistant actions. But, like the meaning of
Theo’s life that ultimately is constructed in the novel, the resilience of the
South is the story of its rising from the ashes of its outdated mores, as
seen more steadily in the slower changes in the old guard, like the
evolving friendship of Clare’s mother Lily with Thalia, an African
American masseuse, and the willingness of Julia’s father to exchange
gardening tips with and socially befriend the wife of the African
American doctor who lives on his block.
Thus, society and culture are important parts of the novel’s
polyphony. Throughout the novel, small changes like these indicate the
presence of ongoing story repair in the narrative of class and race
36
LUX: NARRATIVE SHAPING OF MEANING
relations in the South. As Bruner (2008) points out, not only must a
culture provide “a shared sense of the ordinary” for its members, but it
“must also provide its members with means for understanding and
tolerating deviations from shared ordinariness . . . . One of its principal
means for doing so is through narrative” (p. 35). One such narrative is A
Southern Family, an interweaving of personal and the cultural threads that
both shows the charm of the old South and the need for acceptance of
deviation from it.
Lihong Xie (1995) explores the diverse voices that help shape this
narrative, focusing on the variety of social and ethnic backgrounds and
noting that no one voice predominates, not even the voice of Clare, the
novelist/stand-in for Godwin. Xie asserts that, in this novel “Godwin
realizes fully the artistic possibilities of what Bakhtin calls a ‘hybrid’
novel” (p. 168), succinctly summarizing Godwin’s stylistic shaping of a
complex topic via a carefully crafted multi-viewpoint approach:
Nearly every chapter of the novel is “assigned” to a single
character (on occasion deliberately to two characters) presented as
the center of consciousness in that chapter, providing his or her
unique version of the family story from his or her particular
perspective, in his or her particular language. The entire novel,
then, becomes a cacophony of vastly different voices, languages,
and consciousnesses, vying in turn for recognition and
significance. Three of these chapters have stylistic distinctions
that set them apart from the others: Snow Mullins’ first-person
narrative assertion of her mountain identity and accent; Rafe
Quick’s painful confession to the school psychiatrist, and Clare
Campion’s anguished communion with her dead brother Theo in
the form of a letter . . . . Within each individual chapter, internal
dialogue, narrated stories, and remembered utterances are fused
together to enlarge further the sense of multiplicity and diversity.
(p. 168)
This polyphony helps shape the meaning of the novel, what
Godwin (2011) might call “the intangible space beneath [description,
experience, metaphor, symbol]” (p. 300: journal entry, April 27, 1969). It
is important to the novel that various characters reflect on their lack of
understanding of others and on their perception of others’
misunderstandings of them. This level of reflection helps create a sense
that the old attitudes of the South will perforce die, but the South itself,
NARRATIVE WORKS 3(2) 37
unlike Theo, will not die. Clare, as aunt to Theo’s son Jason and as a
writer, tries to understand the viewpoint of Snow, Theo’s former wife,
and she comes to appreciate the intelligence and authenticity of voice in
Snow, who quit school after ninth grade. She visits Snow where she now
lives and invites Snow to visit her in the beachfront vacation cabin she
and her partner rent. Snow does not come to the cabin. And Clare
recognizes that, without Snow’s help, she cannot fully understand Snow’s
way of life. This recognition of one’s own limited mindset is an important
insight in approaching other cultures.
Xie (1995) calls this heteroglossic, multi-perspectived world of A
Southern Family a “decentered world” (p. 169); however, this is not the
entire truth. The characters are encircling, or centered around, the absence
that is Theo. That paradoxically present absence is the shaping principle
of the novel, for this circling structure relates not just to recreating the
recursion that occurs with trauma (Herman, 1992), with memories of
Theo coming up again and again in different characters, but to the larger
spiritual implications of the novel. Just as the characters experience God
as a physical absence ephemerally present in their thoughts, memories,
and longings, even so they continue to experience Theo more consciously
in his absence than they did when he was physically present. As
communion is celebrated in the church as a “remembrance” of Christ, so
the remembrance of Theo helps the characters to experience a
communion in grief that surpasses any communion they had before
Theo’s death.
Though her insights about the novel’s polyphony are very helpful,
Xie’s use of the word cacophony misrepresents the deftly artistic shaping
of meaning in the novel suggested through the compelling image of the
symphony. Clare’s partner Felix reflects on Brahms’s genius, which,
according to Schumann, “transformed the piano into an orchestra of
mourning and rejoicing voices” (Godwin, 1987, p. 306). In A Southern
Family, this is what Godwin aspires to and achieves: a symphony of
different voices emerging from one instrument: the metaphorical pen of
Godwin. The mourning and celebration come together in the novel to
express, as Brahms did, “an exalted spirit of the times” (p. 306). Focused
on Theo and questions of life’s meaning, A Southern Family is a
wonderful orchestration of voices around the themes of forgiveness,
growth, hope, and resurrected possibility.
38
LUX: NARRATIVE SHAPING OF MEANING
Parallelism
In writing, as in music, parallel patterns help create the
interpretive, as well as the aesthetic, component of meaning-making. In
her letter to Theo, written to him after his death, Clare reflects on their
mother Lily:
The Lily of my childhood believed in Art the way the Lily you
grew up knowing counted on God. It was her resource and her
respite, her trusted magic and her trump card. . . . As far back as I
can remember I was taught by her to believe that special patterns
of words, or the resolutions of chords, or inspired slashes of
colored pigment on a flat surface could make all the difference
between feeling you were an ordinary person, lonely,
disappointed, and trapped, and knowing you possessed a passkey
to a kingdom with powers and privileges unlike any other. (p.
391)
Narrative meaning is shaped, too, by the way characters and ideas
are paired; in particular, Clare’s friend Julia and Clare herself seem to be
paralleled, in their complementary lives and work, with Julia coming back
home to care for her aging father instead of pursuing her writing career as
a historian and Clare escaping her background, moving north, and
becoming a successful novelist. Both have found ways to live full lives
and to not be dominated by the culture in which they grew up. Julia and
Clare’s dialogues and inner thoughts help shape the novel’s philosophical
dimension. Theo and his brother Rafe, close in age, seem paralleled in a
complementary way, too—with Rafe destroying himself with drink but
still aspiring to social acceptance and Theo breaking the social rules and
then destroying himself physically. Theo’s death seems to shake Rafe up
and cause him to deal with his own life, as it were, to live for the two of
them.
Some of the parallels serve to link people of various classes or
conflicting views. Theo’s father Ralph and Theo’s ex-spouse Snow are
paralleled by the cluttered junk outside their homes. Clare’s mother Lily
and Felix’s daughter Lizzie share a parallel desire for the spiritual life,
though, as Jennifer McMullen (2004) points out, Lily tries to achieve her
spirituality by denying her body and Lizzie does so by integrating her
sensuality into her spirituality (pp. 98-99). An interesting parallel may be
seen between Clare’s friend Julia, a historian who gave up being an
NARRATIVE WORKS 3(2) 39
author to teach history at a local university in order to care for her ailing
parents, and W. J. Cash, the fictional author referred to in the novel, who
wrote what Julia calls a brilliant book called The Mind of the South, and
who seemed to be able to be “one of the few Southerners able to live at
home and see it, historically and objectively for what it was, and still love
it” (p. 344). The implication is that Julia is another such. But an
unexpected irony comes in his hanging himself five months after the
publication of his masterpiece. Cash’s life, like Theo’s, calls into question
the meaning of insight about one’s culture if such insight remains
disconnected from creating for oneself a self-actualizing life narrative. In
Cash’s self-destruction, a parallel is suggested between W. J. Cash and
Theo, who also sees many of the flaws in the South but cannot manage to
bring his perceptions into an empowering life narrative of his own. In
addition to character pairings, we have the ongoing ideological pairings
of fiction and fact, then and now, Black and White, North and South,
presence and absence, spirituality and sensuality, autobiography and
fiction. Such parallel pairings proliferate and make the novel
ethnologically and ideationally rich.
Psychologically rich, some of these pairings suggest Jungian
shadow selves. Clare’s explanation to Felix about her relationship with
Theo demonstrates this: “Yet he exasperates me, maybe because I see too
much of myself in him, the kind of person I might have turned into” (p.
309). Through this shadow-side parallel, Godwin explores the mystery of
why one person flourishes and another does not, of why one person
experiences what Gene Cohen (2005) would call the “Inner Push” and
another does not seem to experience the sap-like rising up of life energy
that brings forth “flowering and seasonal growth” (pp. 32-33). Indeed,
Godwin sees a parallel between herself and all her characters. She told
me, “My characters enlarge me because they’re all parts of me. They’re
unfinished parts of me and may be largely unconscious parts of me. So
it’s definitely an interaction” (personal interview, March 18, 2009).
Telling her half-brother’s story through fiction allows her to gain new
perspectives on it, for the very process of creating and learning about the
characters is healing for her. As an artist and human being, she recognizes
increasingly that, even with her primary allegiance shifting increasingly
to the work itself rather than to working out her own issues, still “you can
explore yourself by writing about very different people, and you can also
take parts of yourself and put them into other people. I mean, however
much we are fabricating, we never get out of our own brain” (as cited in
Donlon, pp. 19-20).
40
LUX: NARRATIVE SHAPING OF MEANING
Fascinated by Jungian theory, Godwin spent eleven years in
mostly long-distance, by telephone, Jungian analysis. Thus, the internal
awareness in Godwin of parallels among lives and of shadow selves
enhances her ability to shape a novel in which expanding empathy is
possible for her characters, the author herself, and her readers. Her artistic
use of parallelism in this fictional work helps Godwin achieve the type of
density Jens Brockmeier (2011) attributes to nonfictional
autobiographical narratives: “a thick fabric of interrelated and
interrelating social coordinates. . . . In this universe, the Cartesian
geography of the mind is overwritten by a map of the socialized narrative
mind” (p. 263), but using fiction allows her to go beyond focusing the
work on her own life story repair.
Metanarrative Reflection
Just as Godwin seeks to grow through fictional reflection on
psychological and cultural levels, so she seeks through her fiction to gain
a better understanding of her own writing and of narrative itself. In A
Southern Family, because one of her protagonists (Clare) is a novelist and
another (Julia) is a historian, metanarrative reflections fit smoothly into
the weave of the novel’s plot, thematic content, and overarching thrust to
story repair. Such reflections integrate questions of meaning with
questions of aesthetics and allow author, characters, and readers to enter a
more highly conscious realm regarding the very novel they are engaged
with. Such metanarrative reflections encourage readers of and characters
within A Southern Family to contemplate the relationship of narrative to
meaning-making and to the role of narrative in story repair.
In the following conversation with Felix, Clare reveals the role of
narrative imagination in her own self-actualization, through her having
come up with a way to escape being the battleground for Lily and Ralph’s
differences:
“They’d have kept their marriage together by draining my spirit
and filling up the empty carcass with the poisons they’d brewed
between them. But I ran for my life to my father’s people . . . it
was like I was creating the plot of my own life when I wrote that
letter to my uncle . . . and then I left Theo [to take my place]. He
was only two when I left.” (p. 309)
NARRATIVE WORKS 3(2) 41
This passage illustrates more than just the guilt Clare feels. It is one of the
novel’s many metanarrative reflections: in this case, that the ability to
create a plot for one’s life gives one power to change things, to perform
“story repair.”
One of the stories to be repaired is that of Clare’s novel writing.
As Clare is, in many ways, a stand-in character for Godwin, we can see
that A Southern Family is also a form of story repair of Godwin’s own
writing. As Jane Hill (1992) notes, “Godwin has been, in many ways, her
own best critic” (p.12). In “Becoming a Writer,” Godwin shares this
concern about her work: “I think the most serious danger to my writing is
my predilection for shapeliness. How I love ‘that nice circular Greek
shape’ . . . or a nice, neat conclusion with all the edges tucked under” (as
cited in Hill, p. 13). She places this self-perceived weakness in her work
into the mouth of Theo, in A Southern Family.
In the novel, a criticism Theo gives of Clare’s work, shortly
before his death, haunts her to the point that, when she returns to New
York after his funeral, Clare discards a manuscript she has been working
on for a year. Theo had commented:
“How nice it would be to be a [main] character in one of your
novels . . . because you take care of them so nicely. You let them
suffer a little, just enough to improve their characters, but you
always rescue them from the abyss at the last minute and reward
them with love or money or the perfect job—or sometimes all
three.” (p. 49)
Theo defines the world of Clare’s novels as one “where everything gets
wrapped up at the end” and challenges her, “Why don’t you write a book
about something that can never be wrapped up? What if you came across
something like that in life? Would you want to write about it?” (p. 50).
Clearly, this conversation raises not only aesthetic questions, but
teleological questions, too—about God in relation to His creation, as
compared to Clare’s treatment of her main characters. Indeed, the central
preoccupation of the novel, the death of Theo, never gets “wrapped up”—
neither the questions about his internal motives nor the exact details of
how it happened. This metanarrative conversation provides clues to the
reader about the type of story he or she is reading: one that cannot be
“wrapped up.” It raises questions about the relationship between life and
fiction. Despite the novel’s claim that Clare, as a writer, changes life to
make it art, the novel claims, as well, to resemble life in its lack of neat
42
LUX: NARRATIVE SHAPING OF MEANING
answers. As Thomas Leitch (1986) says, “the fundamental requirement of
all stories is that they be tellable” (p. 33). Through the artistic shaping of
meaning, Godwin makes this untellable story tellable. Fiction provides a
broader canvas than autobiography would have afforded for the
interweaving of story threads, as fact-based autobiography (however
artistically composed) would have compelled her to focus more on her
own story’s repair and less on that of Theo and of the Southern culture.
Through fiction, Godwin is able to make the story larger, to generate
more meaning from it, and, thus, to make it more “tellable.”
Part of what allows her to do this is her awareness of the power of
the “‘silent narratives’ that you hear in your life” (as cited in Donlon, p.
12). In her personal life, one of those silent narratives was that her mother
“didn’t become a writer because she had made choices that would have
made it too difficult. She married, she had children, she had to work.”
Godwin speculates that her internalization of this story “may be a reason
that I didn’t stay married in my several attempts and that I didn’t have
children or ever really want to.” Godwin thinks this silent narrative
contributed to her own ambition and single-mindedness (Donlon, p. 12).
As an author, she calls on her ability to hear the silent narrative of Theo’s
life, to bring it into a form, as he was unable to do so for himself. In A
Southern Family, Clare, like Godwin, escapes an environment that would
have stifled her talent and her dreams. She, like Godwin, experiences
guilt at not attending enough to her step-brother and not caringly
nurturing his escape from the destructive silent narratives of the family
home.
In her letter to Theo, written as a “form of therapy” (p. 372) at
Julia’s suggestion, Clare describes her aspirations as a writer who wanted
a lifestyle that
“would be conducive to the kind of fiction I was trying to write:
deep-breathing, reflective, and with that patience for detail I
admired in those medieval stone carvers who would lavish their
skills on the lowliest gargoyle simply because . . . that was their
job for the day, and every day’s work was done for the glory of
God.” (pp. 380-381)
Not only does the passage link narrative with healing, and artistry with
spirituality, but it provides a metanarrative reflection on fiction. It creates
a standard from within itself for the novel to achieve “deep-breathing,
reflective fiction.”
NARRATIVE WORKS 3(2) 43
At the same time, the suggestion in the novel that writing can be
therapeutic goes beyond the inner bounds of the novel. It ties the
autobiographical underpinnings of the novel to the metanarrative
discussion of what purposes writing can serve. In this context, the entire
novel, the dedication of which reads simply “for Tommy,” might be
considered a long and certainly unconventional letter to Tommy,
Godwin’s deceased brother, written in the form of a multi-voiced novel.
The incident of Tommy’s death created an uncomfortable vacuum
for the surviving family members, who craved a cogent narrative of what
exactly happened and why it happened. “Afterward, we would go over
and over [the event],” taking the police report “out of the files, again and
again . . . , as though the family believed that if we stayed faithfully on
the case some magical number of times the real truth would suddenly
float up from beneath the official text. The real truth being something
everybody could bear,” writes Godwin (2001, p. 149), speaking
autobiographically in Heart. In life and in fiction, no definite explanations
are attainable for the motives and facts of Tommy/Theo’s death. Indeed,
Godwin’s choice of fiction to tell the story exemplifies her respect for the
relationship between fictional narrative and the ability to shift
perspectives on stories in her own and others’ lives. When asked by
Lihong Xie if she would be interested in writing an autobiography,
Godwin responded: “I don’t think I could possibly tell the truth. You
know, because once you tell a story, you tell a story, then the next time
you tell it, you want to tell it a little differently” (as cited in Xie, 1993, p.
180).
Drawing on Polkinghorne and others, Deborah Schiffrin (1996)
highlights that narrative structure can help us to come to “an
understanding of the self as a whole; our actions and experiences gain
meaning through their relationship to one another, as well as their
relationship to general themes or plots” (pp. 168-169). Theo’s death
evokes a key enigma of the novel, and of life: what makes one human
being survive and thrive and another give up? What makes one person
able to create a narrative identity and another not? Why could Clare
create a plot for her life, and why could Felix, despite his difficult
childhood, be a happy and optimistic person with a goal, purpose, and
meaningful career, while Theo loses hope and vision for his life? How
sad that Theo could criticize the over-facile narrative structuring in
Clare’s novels but could not see his way to creating a plot for his life.
44
LUX: NARRATIVE SHAPING OF MEANING
Generative Metaphors
An important affective component of story repair in the novel is
Godwin’s use of generative metaphors. The concept of generative
metaphor being used here leans upon Donald Schon’s The Reflective
Practitioner (1983) and refers to any type of metaphor that helps us to
generate “new perceptions, explanations, and inventions” (p. 185). We
will look at two such metaphors near the end of the novel. Associated
with dreams, these metaphors are lent the heightened interpretive valence
of dream language. To give the novel the perspective of a hopeful
restorying, without erasing or minimizing the fact of the suicide scenario
for Tommy/Theo, Godwin uses spiritually nuanced generative metaphors.
Near the end of the novel, we are told about supernatural
experiences in the beachfront summer cottage that Felix and Clare rent. In
a certain breezy bedroom, Clare’s partner Felix has a “quasi-mystical
experience,” telling Clare, “It was a little like sharing the feelings of God.
For the first time I had the idea that if God exists, He isn’t just a blind
brute force but something that enjoys making new things to love, even if
some of them don’t turn out well, or get destroyed in the process’” (p.
406). Clare, sleeping in that breezy room the next night, has a special
dream in which, on a spaceship, she meets and loves a woman who turns
out to be a timeless essence of herself (pp. 406-407). Later, when Clare’s
editor sleeps in this room, he has a life-transforming vision, too. In its
Greek etymology, pneuma “is connected with breathe or blow, and has a
basic meaning of ‘air in motion’” (Hornblower & Spawforth, 2003). Carl
Gustav Jung (1976), whose writings Godwin has studied and been
influenced by, points out that the pneuma, in the miracle at Pentecost, has
“the double meaning of wind and spirit” (p. 64). This connection for
Godwin is surely intentional. Certainly, in A Southern Family, the
phenomenon of a sea-breezed room that inspires deeply meaningful
dreams suggests a force at work beyond the ordinary, a force that can
blow in new perspectives and catalyze story repair. This windy spiritual
metaphor for human connectedness to spirit contrasts to the piled-up junk
in the living spaces of Theo’s father Ralph and of Theo’s ex-wife Snow;
the junk sullying the beauty of the living spaces around them is a
metaphor for cramped-in, thwarted life stories in need of repair. Thus, the
metaphor of a cleansing and inspiring wind blowing away mental blocks
signals a kind of story repair, though in a metaphysical dimension.
M. Carolyn Clark and Marsha Rossiter (2008) recognize the
“sometimes contradictory” ways we narrativize our identities: “In one
NARRATIVE WORKS 3(2) 45
context we can see ourselves as the hero of the story, while in another we
are someone whose agency is limited” (p. 62). Through her novelistic
artistry, Godwin has succeeded in creating such complexity within and
for her characters, especially Theo. In particular, through generative
metaphors, she lends his story, to use Erik Erikson’s (1980)
developmental term, an element of life generativity that metaphorically
extends his life into the a legacy for those that follow. Though Theo
himself does not generate and offer his own legacy to the next generation
in the self-achieved manner described by Dan P. McAdams (1990, p.
185), Theo nevertheless leaves a lasting legacy. Godwin’s artistic use of
generative metaphor in A Southern Family suggests this legacy derives
from something beyond what we see or touch.
In the last chapter of the novel, Sister Patrick relates a dream she
had on the eve of the anniversary of Theo’s death, and she tells it to
Theo’s mother Lily. The dream’s components are a metaphor for Theo’s
spirit living on, even if human hearing cannot quite catch the words from
beyond this world:
I dreamed of Theo. As soon as I woke up, I knew it had been
Theo. . . . and as we walked up the hill together he was explaining
something to me very forcefully and energetically. . .. He was
trying to explain himself, probably what had happened with the
horse, with Shadow, why she had struck him down. But I couldn’t
hear without my hearing aids in. (pp. 534-5)
Lily responds with faith that this was a message from Theo to say “it’s all
right”:
The details of how he was . . . struck down, exactly what
happened that day, well, they aren’t important: they’re already
over, we don’t need to know because it won’t change anything.
That’s why you didn’t need your hearing aids. But in the realm
that matters, the realm where the indestructible personality lives
on, the realm mere history can’t touch, Theo lives. He lives.. . .
Oh, I consider it a gift, your dream, Sister Patrick. I really do. (p.
536)
Surprisingly, the novel ends not with the activities of the
protagonists, but with Sister Patrick (Theo’s former teacher) and the other
nuns interceding in prayer for the world: “May the Lord bless us, protect
46
LUX: NARRATIVE SHAPING OF MEANING
us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life.” “Amen” (p. 540). The
ending, like the naming and character development of Theo, is
unapologetically spiritual. In two entries, on January 2 and January 4,
1969, Godwin (2011) wrote in her journal: “Imagination—art, religion—
triumphs over reality” (p. 262). “And I know that this religious, mystical,
spiritual thing is very much a part of my ‘calling.’ I feel near to that” ( p.
264). For Godwin, the answer to life’s enigmas is in metaphors of deeper
mystery.
As Frank Kermode (1967) so aptly observes: “Men, like poets,
rush ‘into the middest,’ in medias res, when they are born; they also die in
mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords
with origins and ends such as give meaning to lives and to poems” (p.7).
Godwin provides one such “fictive concord,” one instantiation of how our
stories may seem to fail us but how, too, they may then be revivified,
strengthening our identities both as individuals and as parts of human
community. Because of Godwin’s transparency about the connection
between her life and her fiction, and because of the novel’s being set in
the South, A Southern Family presents a fascinating opportunity to
explore how a traumatic narrative, in the hands of a skillful writer, can be
transformed so as to shape a possible world of meaning out of confusion
and pain. In the novel, this shaping pertains to the individual lives of the
novel’s characters, to the shifting culture of the American South, in which
the novel is set, and to the life and writing of the author herself, in her
attempt to find meaning in and through her writing regarding a sordid life
event. We see, in the case of A Southern Family, an instantiation of
Jerome Bruner’s (2008) idea that the very “function” of art may be “to
rescue the ordinary from its banality, to bring what was taken for granted
back under closer scrutiny” (p. 37). “Our stories,” as Robert Fulford
(1999) reminds us, “are central to our identity, and if they fail us, we may
fall apart” (p. 13). In A Southern Family, the central stories of family,
community, and faith threaten to fall apart. But using a multi-faceted
perspective attainable in art, the novel becomes a form of story repair.
This repair is not a trivial task, nor is it a merely personal undertaking, for
Godwin’s narrative is a part of a larger social and cultural network. In her
fictional reframing of a failed real-life story, Godwin makes the story
present for us on various levels and offers us a model for recasting our
own stories in a context tinged with hope.
NARRATIVE WORKS 3(2) 47
References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. In The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson
& M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Brockmeier, J. (2011). Socializing the narrative mind. Style, 45(2), 259-264.
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Bruner, J. (1991). Self-making and world-making. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 25
(1), 67-78.
Bruner, J. (1998). “What is a narrative fact?” Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 560, 17-27.
Bruner, J. (2008). Culture and mind: Their fruitful incommensurability. Ethos 36(1), 2945.
Clark, M. C., & Rossiter, M. (2008). Narrative learning in adulthood. New Directions for
Adult and Continuing Education, 119, 61- 70.
Cohen, G. D. (2005). The mature mind. New York, NY: Basic.
Donlon, J. H. (1994). Gail Godwin talks about Southern storytelling. Southern
Quarterly, 32 (3), 11-24.
Emerick, R. (2001). Theo and the road to sainthood in Gail Godwin’s A Southern
Family. Southern Literary Journal, 33(2), 134-145.
Erikson, E.H. (1980). Identity and the life cycle. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
Frank, A. (2002). Why study people’s stories? The dialogical ethics of narrative
analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 1 (1), 1-20.
Freedman, J., & Combs, G. (1996). Narrative therapy: The social construction of
preferred realities. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
Fulford, R. (1999). The triumph of narrative: Storytelling in the age of mass culture.
New York, NY: Broadway.
Godwin, G. (1987). A Southern family. New York, NY: Avon.
Godwin, G. (2001). Heart: A natural history of the heart-filled life. New York, NY:
William Morrow.
Godwin, G. (2011). The making of a writer: Vol. 1. Journals, 1963-1969. (R. Neufeld,
Ed.). New York, NY: Random House.
Hanks, P., & Hardcastle, K., eds. (2006). Oxford dictionary of first names (2nd ed.). New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and recovery. New York, NY: Basic.
Hill, J. (1992). Gail Godwin. New York, NY: Twayne.
Hornblower, S., & Spawforth, A., eds. (2003). The Oxford classical dictionary (3rd ed.).
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Howard, G. S. (1991). Culture tales: A narrative approach to thinking, cross-cultural
psychology, and psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 46 (3), 187-197.
Jung, C. G. (1976). The portable Jung. (J. Campbell, Ed.; R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). New
York, NY: Penguin.
Kermode, F. (1967). The sense of an ending: Studies in the theory of fiction. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Leitch, T. M. (1986). What stories are: Narrative theory and interpretation. University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
48
LUX: NARRATIVE SHAPING OF MEANING
McAdams, D.P. (1990). Unity and purpose in human lives: The emergence of identity as
a life story. In A. I. Rabin, R. A. Zucker, R. A. Emmons, & S. Frank (Eds.),
Studying persons and lives ( pp. 148-200). New York, NY: Springer.
McMullen, J. (2004). Gail Godwin’s message: To those who want wholeness. Southern
Quarterly, 42 (3), 95-112.
Room, A. (2002). Cassell’s dictionary of first names. London, England: Cassell
Wellington House.
Schiff, B. (2012). The function of narrative: Toward a narrative psychology of meaning.
Narrative Works, 2(1), 33-47.
Schiffrin, D. (1996). Narrative as self-portrait: Sociolinguistic constructions of identity.
Language in Society 25(2), 167-203.
Schon, D.A. (1983). The reflective practitioner. New York, NY: Basic.
Westerhof, G., & Bohlmeijer, E. (2012). Life stories and mental health: The role of
identification processes in theory and interventions. Narrative Works, 2 (1),
106-28.
Xie, L. (1993). A dialogue with Gail Godwin. Mississippi Quarterly 46 (2), 167-84.
Xie, L. (1995). The evolving self in the novels of Gail Godwin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press.
Elaine Lux, PhD, is full-time Professor of English at Nyack College’s Manhattan
Center, in New York City, and part-time mentor in Literature and Writing for
SUNY/ Empire State College’s Newburgh unit. Her favorite areas of study, in their
intersection with literature, include trauma, narrative, spirituality, and writing for
healing. Dr. Lux has published on Gail Godwin’s holistic spirituality, on
interdisciplinary nontraditional education, on Susan Howatch’s Absolute Truths, on
bone imagery in Amy Tan and Hugh Cook, on images of salvation and healing in
Shusaku Endo and Khaled Hosseini, and on the topic of trauma and fiction in
relation to Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is
Illuminated.